The Fatty Arbuckle Memorial Awards for 2003

MEL GIBSON: It’s All About the Passion
Maybe it’s never wrong to make art from what you believe in — even if what you believe is that Jews killed Jesus, what your father believes is that the Holocaust never happened, and what some of the faith of Moses and Jackie Mason believe is that your particular vision will be a gasoline-soaked rag tossed on the already roaring flames of anti-Semitism. Not that Mel Gibson has to take the heat for any of this. He has already explained that The Passion, his new movie about Jesus’ final hours — in which legions of Semitic ne’er-do-wells are responsible for the Son of God’s demise — was actually directed by the Holy Spirit. Which may be the Lord’s way of saying Alan Smithee.

RUSH LIMBAUGH: Powerless
While never reduced to peddling his ample right-wing kiester on Santa Monica to pay for his habit, Rush Limbaugh did hit the kind of bottom only a hardcore, to-the-curb kind of dope fiend can suffer, i.e., blabbering on national radio that drug users — and here I paraphrase — are weak-willed, irresponsible criminals who should be punished to the full extent of the law . . . Happily, junkies everywhere may be a little quicker to hop off the opiate train now that Limbaugh has been outed as one of their own. Forget Charlie Parker, Lenny Bruce or William Burroughs, the new face of dope fienddom in the 21st century is a jowly, mean, biblically hypocritical, weirdly sex-free Republican with a receding hairline and the charisma of a well-groomed corpse. And for that alone we should thank him.

CHARLES LINDBERGH: Make Room for Daddy
Okay, so he’s dead. It’s a technicality. Last month, America’s most heroic Atlantic-crossing Nazi sympathizer was outed as having a secret second family in the Fatherland. Lindbergh, portrayed by Jimmy Stewart as the ultimate straight arrow in the biopic Spirit of St. Louis, got the hots for a Munich hatmaker named Brigitte Hesshaimer. Frau Hesshaimer bore Lindy three children. Which, while it may tarnish his integrity, in no way impugns his status as heroic Nazi sympathizer. A retro- active fuckup.

Jerry Stahl’s new novel, I, Fatty, is the story of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, told in the voice of Arbuckle himself. Embracing the early days of Hollywood — when heroin was legal and cocaine came in sodas — it recounts the epic saga of a fat boy who waddled out of Nowheresville, Kansas, to become the first star to make a million a year — and the first to be laid low by an epic scandal of sex and murder. Published by Bloomsbury, the book will be released in June 2004.